Kevin MacDonald’s documentary about the late reggae legend Bob Marley is both
sensitive and fascinating

The late Bob Marley was one of those rare musicians who could write songs that were universally appealing without being bland. His music was also firmly rooted in Jamaica, acquainting audiences around the world with “the government yard in Trenchtown,” sung with such powerfully understated nostalgia in No Woman, No Cry.

Kevin MacDonald’s fascinating documentary, Marley, goes back to the tin-roofed shack in the village where he was born, the son of a Jamaican girl and an older white man called Norval Marley whom he rarely saw. The white family shunned him, and the black community looked down on him for being mixed-race. This appears to have inspired neither resentment nor a feeling of inferiority but a sense of unique purpose: he was described by one friend even as a teenager as “a serious focus guy”.

Music and the Rastafari movement gave him the inspiration that was to make him both a world-wide star and significant political force before his death at the age of 36.

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This documentary treads the honourable middle way between hagiography and hatchet-job, but its complex subject still emerges from it as highly impressive. MacDonald has interviewed Marley’s wife Rita, who bore his very public infidelities with grace, and also his children by her, in whom one can still sense pain that their father’s attention so often seemed to belong to others.

Cindy Breakspeare, the Jamaican Miss World 1976 and the star’s girlfriend, speaks too: she might have been the ultimate in glamour, but with her – as with his other women – the patriarchal Marley was strict about cosmetic artifice, preferring the natural look in accordance with Rastafari principles. It says something for his charisma that the women he loved retained their affection for him.

It may come as a surprise to those who now vaguely associate Marley with a marijuana haze and a “one love” philosophy that he was equally defined by his formidable rigour: his focus was on eating healthily, exercise, fierce competition and spiritual contemplation.

There was courage, too: he went ahead with the 1976 “Smile Jamaica” free concert, intended to calm warring factions in the country, two days after he had been injured in a gun attack at his home. He flashed his wound on stage, causing his former lawyer to wryly ask: “What more do Jamaicans love than a man who just survived a gunfight?”

The footage from the times still carries a palpable charge, notably the 1978 One Love Peace Concert when Marley, dancing like some electrifying shaman, persuaded Michael Manley, then leader of the ruling party in Jamaica, and his political opponent Edward Seaga to shake hands on stage.

Elsewhere are moments which are more poignant in retrospect: in Zimbabwe for its independence ceremony in 1980, Marley performed while a young, plummy-voiced Robert Mugabe promised a joyous crowd to “well and truly serve Zimbabwe.” Mugabe lived long, got small and failed his people. Marley did none of those things.

This review also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph